Living Debt Free – Dave Ramsey and The Total Money Makeover

Another one my life passion’s that developed shortly after Sean and I got married is living responsibly financially. This all started on our trip home from our honeymoon. I had borrowed my sister’s Kindle, and I had just finished reading the book Water for Elephants. Since we were on our way home, I did not want to start a book that I could not finish. I stumbled upon the book The Total Money Makeover, and my thought was, I will browse through this book because I do not care if I am not able to finish it. Ironically, I was not able to finish the book, but instead of the mentality that it was a book that I would not mind finishing, it was the complete opposite. I immediately went to our library and checked the book out to finish reading it. Then I persuaded my husband, Sean, to read the book. While the concepts of The Total Money Makeover are so simple, somehow reading the book and the way that Dave Ramsey outlines the concepts was revolutionary for us. I mean it when I say that reading the book The Total Money Makeover was life changing. When we got back from our honeymoon we decided to test out the concepts for the rest of the month of January by doing a loose budget, then we officially began budgeting and using the Dave Ramsey envelope system in February of 2012. When we began our journey to become debt free our debt snowball (or total amount of debt) was over $70,000. Our debt consisted of student loans and car loans only. As of now, we are on target to be able to yell “we’re debt free” in November 2013.

Sean and I are so pleased with our choice to follow the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover plan and to live debt free and be financially responsible. It has been extremely rewarding and has strengthened our relationship. Statistics show that disagreement over money is one of the leading causes of marital problems and divorce. This makes us feel optimistic that we chose to take charge of what we do with our money and open the communication when discussing money matters so early on in our marriage. We are both “nerds” when it comes to budgeting and actually look forward to planning our budgets each month and being on the same page when it comes to “telling our money where to go”. The future looks so bright from this view!!